Visiting a new country is always extra special for me and a couple of weeks ago, I got to do just that and visited Beijing, China for the first time.
After TDC in Floripa, I flew to Beijing for QCon conference and for a Google Developer Group (GDG) meetup. It was the first time for me in China (my 48th country!) and first time speaking at QCon, so I was naturally excited. I didn’t know what to expect in Beijing but I was pleasantly surprised. Beijing is a modern city with good public transportation and interesting sites to visit. I got the feeling that it’s also very international with many expats, definitely more than I expected. I visited the iconic sites like Tiananmen Square and the Great Wall of China. I also visited Google’s Beijing office (my 35th Google office visit!)
QCon Beijing
QCon is a global conference that happens in multiple locations like New York, London, San Francisco, Sao Paulo, Beijing, Shanghai. QCon Beijing was a multi-day multi-track conference with more than 1000+ attendees on a diverse set of topics. I could only attend the last day of the conference on Sunday.
I did my Istio 101 talk to a full room of probably 200 people. I was surprised by the number of attendees and the level of questions I received after my talk. It seems like many people in Beijing are active users of the cloud related technologies like Kubernetes and they were very curious about Istio.
Questions
After my talk, I received the usual Istio questions such as:
- When will Istio be production ready?
- What’s Istio roadmap, what features are planned in the upcoming releases?
- What’s the performance overhead of Envoy proxy?
- What are the performance characteristics of Istio?
I also received a couple unique questions such as:
- How do you talk from Istio to an external database?
- What’s the state of CloudFoundry with Istio?
- How to upgrade Istio? What’s the recommended procedure?
GDG Beijing
A couple of days after QCon Beijing, I did the same Istio talk at Google Developer Group in Beijing. It was at a co-working space and organizers did a great job in putting the event together with banners, videos before the event and a great Q&A session after my talk.
Questions
After the talk, we had an extensive Q&A session. There were the usual Istio questions on roadmap, production readiness and envoy overhead. More interesting questions I remember were:
- How long lived connections are handled in Istio?
- How to delete route rules without yaml?
- How does Istio see user agent headers when encrypted?
- Will Istio replace or integrate with Spring Cloud?
- How is Istio different from Rancher?
Overall, I was very happy to get the chance to visit this great city and country and hope to come again in the near future.
Originally published at meteatamel.wordpress.com on May 8, 2018.